Articles manufactured by series production, particularly packaged bags of ice such as bagged candy, bagged ice cubes, and the like, are often dispensed into a storage unit. Machines for making ice and delivering bags with loose ice cubes may be deployed in supermarkets. Such machines are designed with a top part with an ice cube machine and a central packing machine packing the ice cubes loosely in bags, and a lower part with a storage compartment or area for bagged ice from which the filled ice cube bags are supplied as the customer opens an access door to the storage compartment, providing himself with a desired number of ice cube bags. Examples of such machines are described in the applicant's patent application WO 2008/089762 and U.S. Pat. No. 8,122,689 issued on Feb. 28, 2012.
One problem with such machines is that the bags fall down into the storage compartment over the same position. Over time, a stack of bags forms a pyramid. This causes the storage compartment to be badly utilized as it can only be partially filled, resulting in low capacity for a storage compartment of a given size. The pyramid of stacked bags rapidly reaches the top of the compartment in times of low ice demand, so now bags cannot be added until some are removed for purchase. However, when demand for ice is high, for example on public holidays or in hot weather, the storage compartment rapidly empties and the ice bagging machine cannot keep up with the demand. This requires manual refill by store personnel, and sometimes bagged ice must be delivered to the store and manually moved into the freezer compartment to provide sufficient ice to meet customer demand.
The manual leveling and manual refilling is a problem due to work safety considerations that limit the time in which the employees are allowed to work with frozen products, and a desire to release the employees' resources for other purposes in the supermarket.